The Narratives of Educational Research

Why all these mediations? On any level of doing education one is always faced with the imperative questionings of what, when, how, why, with whom – and ultimately the fact that you have to act. Education challenges you to express yourself and hence to interpret others and yourself and the context within which education is taking place. Once education is performed, it is no longer there. When time passes, what remains from actions and utterances in research are descriptions or representations of what has been. This challenges us to acknowledge that we live in a time of interpretation (Kristensson Uggla 2002, Mink 1970). In educational research – foremost in some of its empirical strands, but also in some of its theoretical – the question of how to present what we think goes on in education is faced with a “crisis of representation “(Denzin & Lincoln 2005, Lyotard 1984, Patton 2002) and with the challenges inherent in any narration, which require a bifurcation between necessary and irrelevant events as a basis for inclusion and exclusion in the story (Mink 1972).It is easy to overlook that in research everything represented is already mediated. This process, moreover, goes all the way down to perception; thus it is operative in the collection of the data itself. This insight forces us to reconsider “the sense of the given”(Standish 2002). Is it possible to grasp something about learning experiences in education through a phenomenological-hermeneutical approach? This also comprises the question whether there is some kind of embodied knowledge that frame and structure our understanding of knowledge and knowledge in educational research. Most forms of research are presented through writing, which means through text. As a result of this textual nature, research –as reality itself – makes different readings possible. Are there any ways back to the practice of teaching and learning through all the texts that are produced in educational research without acknowledging that the practice of teaching and learning is also a text – a text that is perpetually re-presented and unavoidably misconstrued? Or do we simply have to acknowledge that teaching and learning in practice and research about these processes are two separate/different fields? What we aim to explore through this symposium are some problems related to re-presentations of education through research, both its challenges and possibilities. In the three different contributions of this symposium three aspects of educational research in a time of interpretation is addressed. The first presenter, Knudsen, will address the relation between embodiment and forms of knowledge. The second presenter, Mus, is addressing the tension between epistemological demands and its ethical consequences in his paper: Getting it right: The ethics of accuracy in educational research. In the last presentation, Hoveid and Hoveid will argue that it is a framing of educational research as narratives which mediate meanings which can helps us understand connections between educational knowledge and the ethical.